Hitchens

by zunguzungu

I’m not particularly moved by Hitchens’ death, to be honest — I only ever knew him as the neoconservative he became, not the whatever it was he was before that — but the residual Christian in me does remind me to try to give up grudges that no longer have an object. So I won’t say any new bad things about the man. I was moved, though, to look up what I had written about him over the years. And I found that this scathing — some have said “shrill” — response to a column he wrote in support of the French ban on veils was the main piece of anti-Hitchens vitriol I had produced:

For what it’s worth, that third post is one of the better things I’ve ever written, a piece I need to go back to and work up and think through more thoroughly. I’m proud to have written it, and I wouldn’t have written if I hadn’t first felt the need to vent my spleen at Hitchens in the first one, and perhaps it’s good because I didn’t really direct it at Hitchens at all. So, since his column was the grain of sand that allowed me to produce my very modest pearl, for that small gift, I thank him, and let him rest in peace.

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26 Comments to “Hitchens”

Hitchens as “neoconservative” is pretty silly. The man was an avowed Marxist until his death, always anti-Zionist, and supported Nader in 2000.

More importantly, international interventionism isn’t exactly a weird strain of thought when it comes to Marxism. Using the state to crush cultural and religious practices that get in the way of the revolution is pretty normal stuff.

He was a statist Marxist (so we’re clear, I don’t mean in that the way libertarians would say that with a sneer. Quite the opposite). Whence comes the “neoconservative”?

Well, he didn’t care for the neocon label, but he definitely threw in with the post-911 project that could be loosely called neocon. And all sorts of one-time ’68 marxists found a home in those ranks; the transformation was not unprecedented. In any case, I just mean “the CH who was all about liberating people via war”; if neocon is an imprecise term for that, then, well, I was being imprecise.

I don’t think “imprecise” really covers this at all. It just so happens that Hitchen’s Marxist internationalist thought was tangent to American neoconservative thought on the issue of whether or not to invade Iraq; that doesn’t mean a member of one was actually a member of the other. And they certainly didn’t share all the same reasoning, either.

I think “beyond ridiculous” is the better term for calling Hitchens a neocon. One alliance on a particular issue? Really? This is the same logic people use when calling FDR a Nazi. Because, you know, they both advocated for government health care.

I really think “imprecise” is fine, everyone. Actually I think this names an imprecision Hitchens cultivated and encouraged—even the kind of imprecision that his celebrated “precision of thought” depended on, maybe.

I was a student at the University of Chicago in 2005, where I saw him give a talk titled “Can One Be a Neoconservative?”—he presented it as a Hegelian analysis of competing strands in American neoconservative thought, one of them represented by Henry Kissinger, the other by Paul Wolfowitz. Hitchens stressed what he obviously felt to be the incredibly significant world-historical differences between these two positions, and said that what he was witnessing now was the crucial moment when they would split for good, and people would side with one or the other. In the last couple of days a few people have written about how so much of his (late) work comes out of an intense attachment to the idea of such a moment—supposedly the instant of utter clarity, which you never, ever change your mind about. But, anyway, it was clear that he was giving this talk in response to accusations of neoconservatism, and that, in his answer, he felt it was important for him to distance himself from one position and strategically essential for him to “throw his hat in the ring” with the other. Without necessarily self-identifying as a neoconservative. I think both Hitchens and the crowds of UChicago students who loved him got a lot of pleasure from hovering in the penumbra of “neoconservative” in this way. You’re not just a neoconservative, because that would be vulgar, and you’re clearly smarter than Bush and Rumsfeld. But you’re not not a neoconservative either, because that would make you an apologist for Islamofascism.

So, for whatever it’s worth, I doubt he would have felt the need for this string of furious denials on his behalf, although they seem revealing to me.

Well, aren’t you Mr. Gracious? Your memory of Christianity is pretty hazy if you think the instruction is to give up grudges that no long have an object. Yeesh.

Your relentless self-promotion aside, you could learn a thing or two from Hitchens about style, not to mention the ability to, say, edit a piece that wallows in its own verbiage down to something that people might actually want to read. And no that doesn’t mean the flaccid prose of the Guardian or the Salon piece.

Hi Anonymous! Stop reading me if the experience does not fill you with joy! Also, consider going and fucking yourself!

More productively, it’s interesting the way CH being a good writer or being eloquent gets treated as a kind of moral quality in its own right, the sentiment that, well, he might have had a whole bunch of abhorrent positions and found conducting war against arab civilians to be all kinds of awesome, but hey, he was witty as hell. Seems like a category error to me; both can be true without having anything to do with each other. Kissinger, too, was a great guy to have around at cocktail parties.

It’s not that clean, though, Aaron. Yes, he advocated positions we find abhorrent, but he also advocated many we don’t, and did so just as vigorously. I think the desire to condemn a complex man is just, well, I don’t know. I’m going to go write something about Céline as parsing that’ll be less complicated.

Hello non sequitor! At no point did I link the virtues of his prose style to his opinions.

I’m going to ignore the intellectual poverty of your all too common suggestion that the reader has two choices: 1. Read it and like it, like our friend Richard. 2. Stop reading. Because guess what? I read it, I didn’t like it, and now I’ve let you know about it.

Aaron, this is as good a place as any to thank you for planting the seed of reading DuBois beyond just his (very much worth reading, though I only got to it earlier this year) The Souls of Black Folk. I’m just now finishing up Dusk of Dawn, for example, mostly finding it fascinating (with occasional iffy stretches).

That’s Aaron’s tribute to Hitchens, to spell it out for you (Note, for example, how many times Hitch uses “I” in his columns immediately following 9-11); it took me a while to get it, and then I was like, “ahaa!”

let’s be arrogant! ya! hitchens will inspire us TO NO FUCKING END! i personally drink a carton of scotch a day, smoke ten packs of cigs and have a very questionable personal life. when i’m not stepping on others. and i think i’m so, so funny when i scramble up some words for breakfast, har har me.

btw, who started neo-con ideology and lead it to his death? irving kristol, who i am SURE thought he was pure to the end as a neo-trotskyist. bomb!

if anything, these men can educate us ALL on how anyone of us can be distorted and twisted in our search for change and power within our little short lifespans. good sucking to you!

luckily for us, hitchens had less time to fuck things up than irving. good riddance. no shame here.

If you want to read Hitchens that won’t make you angry, I recall his literary criticism being quite good–the longer-form stuff he wrote for the Atlantic. One of the things that irritated me about the praise heaped upon him after his death was the emphasis on how much he wrote and how easily he turned in good copy, and during the period I read him in the 00s you could tell what had been thought out and what had merely been written. Which was virtually everything he wrote for Slate. YMMV; I haven’t read Hitchens in years, mostly because his political stuff at Slate burned me out.

Katha Pollitt’s excellent essay on Hitchens, aside from her equally valuable points about his opinion of women, was one of the few to pick up on that and be critical of Hitchens for it (and the editors who enabled it).

And you appear to be clanontifg unethical behavior with hardcore prison sentences, as if the two can’t possibly be separated. Your lessons on what we try not to do “in America” are self-serving, and duck the basic questions of right and wrong that I asked. Doing wrong while evading punishment is not exactly unknown “in America.”Bush initially promised to fire “anyone” involved, a P.R. statement he probably regretted. Bush quickly retreated to legalistic loopholes that would permit him to fire no one. That’s the operative legalese here, not a nonexistent proposal to waive rules of evidence to put Republicans in jail. It’s not about putting Karl Rove onto the rockpile at Alcatraz by all means necessary. It’s about the righteous implication that Karl Rove did nothing wrong. It’s about Bush publicly pretending not to “know the facts” about a case he and Cheney had overseen.If you think that’s Bush doing “reasonably well” in the honor department, and “almost perfectly” re Plame, that’s a moral standard I’m happily unfamiliar with. I guess it all depends on what your definition of “beyond shame” is.

We also had a phone call from this company (Paul Davenport) in October, sttniag they had sold our timeshare ( as we had been on line looking to sell), and needed a security of a31800 to be taken from our credit card, and upon completion ( when the deeds were collected from us) it would be refunded, they sent us a contract to sign for the sale. As we did not hear from them we contacted them in December to find out when the deal would be closed. Surprise surprise they advised us that the purchaser had pulled out, and a company under their umbrella would be contacting us today re this sale. To sum up we have a amount outstanding of a31800 which they will now hold until our timeshare is sold, which could be anything from 1 month to 12 months. Any advice please.

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